3 minutes of Far Cry 3 white-knuckle wingsuit madness

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If you haven’t been following Far Cry 3, you should. The games is an excellent, open-world romp around around a tropical island — not entirely unlike a better version of Just Cause 2. Before seeing this video I would have noted that any comparison to JC2 was seriously flawed because you spend about half of that game floating through the world on a gravity-defying parachute while FC3 is all about running around and fast travel. Little did I know that, at some point in the game, you get a wingsuit…

[To be fair, this could be considered a bit of a spoiler — I’m over 20 hours into the game and I don’t have the wingsuit yet. In other words, go right ahead and skip the video if you’d like.]

In the video we see FC3‘s hero, Jason Brody, jumping from one of the tallest peaks in the game and then gliding around the Rook Islands, perilously close to both the ground and immovable objects. The jump lasts about two and a half minutes, after which he (another spoiler) deploys the parachute and lands safely. While diving we Brody floats safely by wildlife, enemy forces, and loads of beautiful scenery.

In real life, wingsuits go about 60 miles per hour and descend at around 73.3 feet per second (according to the US Parachute Association). This means that the 130 second jump would have propelled Brody about 2.17 miles with a loss in altitude of 9500 feet. The tallest mountain in the South Pacific is actually Mount Wihelm in Papua New Guinea, which is 14,800 feet tall, but it’s a clear outlier. On a smaller island chain, like the Solomon Islands, the tallest peak is Mount Popomanaseu which is 7660 feet tall. In other words, the game isn’t clearly a bit fantastic, but it’s hold on reality isn’t too loose (aside from the fact that, you know, you play as a normal prep school-type kid who dismantles an island of trained killers and angry komodo dragons).